It’s not so much our design I want to talk about: not an direct explanation of what everyone can see on the drawings/panels. I would like to talk around it, as it were: things that play a small role in the background, things that whirled around in our heads when we worked on the Thessaloniki ladder, as we called it. This is not because we don’t beleave in the power of our design, it must be clear that we do - even though we didn’t win - it is because we [ in our dutch office] beleave that those small things in background are of the utmost importance to the designing process: effort and result. Things, ideas, opinions, inventions, that exist allready, kind of latently, for a long time and suddenly become apparent, onm the surface, when one starts to work on a certain design: not the kind of thing that magicians come up with, not the kind of romantic, poetic approach of waking up in the night and suddenly know the answer to problems and doubts. Just small things that suddenly become keywords or leading figures.

This process seems especially useful for the Thessaloniki competition, simply because the questions asked in the competition brief could be described in such terms. A detailled history, speaking of interesting events; a major greek harbour city, prosperitiy and a growing number of inhabitants, but in an obscure, subtle and unconcious kind of way having an urban and architectural situation that doesn’t seem to fit, to satisfy. Lots of clues but no way to point out the culprit (bad guy). There’s a hiatus, a gap, in the city, illustrated by Hebrard strangely formated interruption, this halfly ending axis in the very heart of the city.

In our proces a design appears, when we try to translate the ‘small things’ into realistic interventions in the urban tissue and architectural elevations.

By this time of course, when we start translating and using them, these ‘small background things’ aren’t small any longer. Architecture starts, where ideas are being translated into perceptible, physic reality; "where mind and matter meet", to speak with Louis Kahn. In this sence architecture is poetry.

Now, some background things, small things.

During the 19th century the architectural debate was dominated by the controverse between "style" and "character". Both terms in fact reflect 18th century problems, however they became apparent around 1840. We tend to look back at this historic debate as a bit silly discussion: we - looking back with modernistic eyes, can only see those terms as two words for both sides of one problem: classicism. When we take a closer look, it may appear to be quite an interesting issue to elaborate on, for 2 reasons:

First - it seems that our times do not differ too much from the late 19th century in terms a having lost a certain stability in opinion of how to establish architecture while living towards a new era.

Second - since we’re dealing with a ancient greek city, classic, style(!), that has lost its city heart on the change of the century and regained a new heart: exactly based on ( French romantic) character!

"Style" sticks to Vitruvian rules, "character" stands for emotional, organic buildings.

They meet in shape of a rigid grid structure as the major lay-out of the city and the axis in the middle; which of course creates big tension. How to use this tension? Do we want to keep on building and growing according to the grid, or do we emphasize the intervention of the axis? Do we chose for style or character, or have they really lost all importance to us?

That brings me to another "small thing". A more general approach to the city, remebering the old words that St Paul wrote to the congregation of ancient Thessaloniki: investigate all but keep the good things. Here I have a huge translation problem as well: I know this text in my own language, in Pauls formal greek language (he was used to speak hebrew and took quite some effort to learn greek) and I have to adress you now in English, explaining that I’m interested in this word keeping, or preserve, maintain, also guard and entrust. It also has to do with knowledge and consciousness, how else can one preserve. Not so much with conservation. It is an interesting word in the city’s context because according to the competition brief, we’re not allowed to build a lot and the general awareness of its glorious past and different stages of growth has to be organised without making real buildings. It lead us to the beleaf that changing the city not so much deals with the architecture, but more with the state of mind op people using the city, the inhabitants. And that state of mind can be influenced in many ways. Especially our century has proved to be very good at influencing people: think about politics and soccer games, but also about Disney world and agressive commercials.

Like the big museums and exhibitions have shown us on several occasions: precious things can only be preserved when they are presented to the public as entertainment and usually in such a way that big money can be made out of it.

Is this going to happen to the precious things of cities like Thessaloniki as well?

How to make the city’s precious parts present?

We decided to use the idea of entertainment, the museum part for the design but in a slightly different way.

In an attempt to solve the "style" and "character" question as well.

The first obvious manifestation of entertainment in the world of art was the birth of "panorama’s" in painting. Panorama’s showed a certain view, usually landscapes or cityscapes, in 360 degrees. Going all around. One entered the exhibition by a dark staircase or ladder, ending in a kind of pavilion, matching the depicted scene. Around the public was the painting and invisible for the visitors, natural light came from a glass roof. Going up in the darkness, ending in the middle of a painting caused a shock of delight for 19th century visitors. The panorama’s were immensely popular and usually travelled from city to city to entertain the public. Part of the trick is the meaning of the dark passage, that leads the visitor to an unkown world, which is no longer real, but fantastic. Back into the real world one is releaved that after such a shock the real world proves incredibly real again: nothing has changed, still the same world. That is re-assuring. On this principle the whole Disney empire was built.

Other paintings of the romantic kind, which were shown elsewhere, were not so much loved by the public, but they express sometimes better what art is supposed to bring about: to stir the public, giving them the uneasy feeling that the impression of the art become an important part of their reality and thus make them unsure of the future, unsure of the ‘real’, leaving them doubtfull and a bit lost.

And that it is the way we wanted to use the entertainment. That is the way in which we wanted to give Thessaloniki back to its inhabitants and to preserve its precious parts.

Next small issue concerns the representation of the city by means of diagrams, which becomes a more popular method these days. Rem Koolhaas for instance uses diagrams as a basis of his designs. We like to point out that is not so much the diagrams that work like a pictorial methaphor (like Deleuze advocates) that interests us: its the programmatic diagram that looks promising to us. Foucaults description of ‘an abstraction of cultural, political and organisational effects’, matches this idea of diagram.

Urban form is based on dynamic behaviour and to design urban form, to plan, to create policy, one has to understand the mechanics of these dynamics. Isolation of the sources of change can be done by means of diagrams; scheme’s, in order to reach a level of abstraction in which unexpected connections can be made.

So, diagrams become tools of modelling or simulations of situations in motion. We used such a diagram in the design of our ladder, simulating all events along the Aristoteles axis as being part of an electric circuit, each activity connected to all others and bringing about different contacts. In a way, our whole ladder is just the translation of this diagram.

And then the’re the events. Even most of them were allready present, but we isolated them and gave them a place, a meaning and a way to entertain. Sometimes a museum, sometimes a restaurant. That’s of course the character" part: it writes, it makes verses or ‘preserves’ the beauty of Thessaloniki. It closes the gap between the existance of the city and the consciousness of its inhabitants, which formerly was illustrated by the same Aristoteles axis: a wound in the city’s structure. And it collides with the existing patterns, so that every collision means an assault, a shocking confrontation with unexpected events; real and part of real life.

So the wooden ladder became a stitch, necessary to make the city recover and regain its cheerfull atmoshpere. The stitch is an alien structure (like Herbards was), put on top of the old one, linking the seperated parts again, untill the wound has healed and the stitch disappears into the new fabric. This stitch, this wooden ladder was brought up in our minds as an image and hopefully I have explained to you - somehow - how this funny intervention with Onassis’ watchtower, with the room of long-lost-memories, with the Turkish tree tank and the theatre bridge and the murmuring voice void came up and how it was translated into the design that is presented here today.